Earth Wise

The Amazon rainforest absorbs one-fourth of all the carbon dioxide absorbed by the land of the Earth.  It is by far the world’s largest rainforest, bigger than the next two largest – in the Congo Basin and Indonesia – combined.  Nearly two-thirds of it is found in Brazil but the more than 2 million square […]

Many places around the world have experienced extraordinary heat waves this summer.  The 31 days of high temperatures 110 degrees or more in Phoenix is a prime example but many other places suffered from extreme and relentless heat.  Why did this happen? The overarching reason is climate change, which has warmed the Earth by 2.2 […]

Batteries are playing a bigger and bigger role in our lives.  Apart from their use in ubiquitous smartphones, laptops, and other devices, millions of electric vehicles are hitting the roads, and utilities are installing giant banks of batteries to store energy generated by wind and solar farms. The necessary characteristics of batteries are high energy […]

Plants are a critical resource because of the countless ways they support life on Earth. Plants release oxygen into the atmosphere, absorb carbon dioxide, and provide food and habitat for humans and wildlife.  Plants are also used to produce fibers, building materials, and medicines.  Plants form the backbone of natural ecosystems, and absorb about 30% […]

It is summer here in the United States, but it is winter in Antarctica.  Antarctic sea ice is water that forms and melts entirely in the ocean and it has a pattern of growth and reduction that has been monitored by satellites for the past 44 years.  The area of sea ice that surrounds the […]

Steel was first made thousands of years ago.  The discovery that heating up iron ore in a hot enough charcoal fire could purify the iron into a strong and valuable material was the start of the Iron Age.  In many ways, things have changed very little since then. Global iron and steel production accounts for […]

We are always talking about the millions of tons of waste plastic that finds its way into the oceans and about the challenges of trying to remove it.  A new multinational study has found that the concentration of plastics and microplastics in some lakes is even worse than in the so-called garbage patches in the […]

There has been growing interest in installing solar panels on top of reservoirs to make use of the available space to make electricity and reduce evaporation.  There has been far less interest in installing solar on canals and aqueducts.  But that is changing and a new project in California is part of that change. A […]

The food system is responsible for 70% of the world’s freshwater use and almost 80% of freshwater pollution.  About three-quarters of the ice-free land area of the planet has been affected by human use, primarily for agriculture.  Land-use change such as deforestation is a major source of biodiversity loss.  What we choose to eat has […]

People have generated 8 billion tons of plastic waste over time and less than 10% of it has been recycled.  Millions of tons of it escapes into the oceans.  Plastic piles up virtually everywhere on earth. There are many approaches to dealing with the plastic waste problem and no one of them is a magic […]